Ida Hadjivayanis is a scholar and literary translator specialising in Swahili, translation studies and the cultures of the Indian Ocean world. She is Senior Lecturer in Swahili and Chair of the Centre of African Studies at SOAS University of London. Her research explores Swahili translation practices, multilingualism, diaspora and the ways literature carries histories and identities across languages. Her published translations include Abdulrazak Gurnah’s Paradise and Theft, rendered in Swahili as Peponi and Dhulma, as well as Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.

Her current work also considers how artificial intelligence may shape literary retranslation. By placing machine-generated language in dialogue with established human translations, she examines both the creative possibilities and the limitations of translation technologies.

Translations